Free The Home Corner by Ruth Thomas

sparrows were perched high up in our little cherry tree, making their summer, suburban sound, but they all ceased, as if they had been switched off, when we slammed our car doors shut. ‘Home sweet home,’ my mother said. She had said this for so many years that it had become a truism rather than fondly ironic, which was what I think she intended.
    We took the shopping bags out of the boot and plodded with it all up the front path. Then my mother unlocked the door, and we stepped in. The hallway smelt, as it always did, of the washing drying on the pulley and of honey and fried onions. It was home. And I loved it and I hated it. It was like a poem by Catullus that I’d learned once at school, ‘ Odi et amo ’:
    ‘I hate and I love. You ask how this can be . . . I do not know – I just know – and it tortures me . . .’
    I had to keep the hate part of it to myself, though. There was no one I could talk to about that.
    ‘So,’ my mother said, ‘let’s unpack and get tea organised.’
    ‘Yeah. I’m just going up to my room for a bit,’ I said. ‘I’ll come and help in a minute.’
    And I sprang upstairs.
    *
    My room was full of things I had outgrown. The bean bag Ed McRae had once sat on was slumped in a slightly abject way in one corner of the room, and my old flowery duvet was flopped across my bed. Standing on my pine bookshelves was a half-empty bottle of moisturising cream I’d bought when I was sixteen, and the Mr Men tin I’d had since I was nine, and a sea urchin Sondrine had given me the day I left Moonchild. ‘No hard feelings, Luisa,’ she’d said, handing me this hard crustacean shell. Which I’d thought was quite funny. The sea urchin stood now on top of a little plastic bag which contained a small amount of fine soil and had a label on it saying, Congratulations: You Now Own a Piece of Texas . Stella had given it to me after she’d been on holiday there once. It was the sort of thing Stella had used to give people.
    The clutter on my bookshelves had begun to resemble a kind of archaeological dig, it occurred to me. It had historical layers. I walked over and peered at a black-and-white photograph that was perched at the back, behind my alarm clock. It was of me as a baby, the print framed within narrow white borders. Sometimes, looking at that picture, I would try to remember how I had once been, how I had once viewed the world. But it was impossible. I was just a puzzled, pale-faced infant peering out from my mother ’s arms. Baby Luisa, June 1976 , it said on the back, in her handwriting. My mother occasionally mentioned how nice it would have been if other children had come along; if siblings had turned up, she used to say, as if siblings were people invited to a party. But I was my parents’ only child: that was just the way it was.
    On the wall beside my bookshelf there was a cork noticeboard, on which was pinned a letter my old German penfriend Beate Groschler had once sent me. She’d sent it more than a year earlier – before I’d even started working at Moonchild . I’d only ever met Beate twice: once when she’d come to see me in Scotland, and once on a return trip to Germany. But she’dalways seemed to be leading a calm, beatific life in Frankfurt, and in the photos she sent her face was always settled and kind. When she was younger, she’d used to send me recipes for cinnamon biscuits and plum dumplings, but in this last letter she’d mentioned a new boyfriend whose name was Frank and who was going to be studying law in Mainz.
    I could still remember opening it, the day I came home from my emergency meeting with Mr Deane. I’d read it standing in the porch, my mother’s spider plants drooping sympathetically from pots over my shoulders.
    ‘ Hello, Luisa!’ Beate had written, her greeting encircled in a little heart. ‘How are you? I hope good. We are cracking up on Friday. When do you crack up?’
    And I had started to laugh. Which might, in a way, have answered her